The TV's Wi-Fi keeps dropping

Wi-Fi disconnections on older televisions are a classic. The cause is rarely just one thing.

Check the real state

adb shell dumpsys wifi | head -30

And the signal quality:

adb shell cat /proc/net/wireless

The level value tells you the received strength. Below -70 dBm you are going to have problems whatever you do.

The causes, by frequency

1. Marginal signal. Televisions carry modest aerials and usually sit flat against a wall, sometimes with their own metal panel in the way. This is cause number one.

2. Power saving. Some models shut the Wi-Fi radio down in standby and do not recover it well. Look under Settings → Network for something like "keep Wi-Fi on during sleep".

3. 5 GHz with poor reach. 5 GHz is faster and passes through walls worse. If the television is far from the router, force it to 2.4 GHz.

4. A congested channel. In a block of flats, 2.4 GHz channel 6 is usually saturated. Changing it on the router is free and sometimes fixes everything.

5. A duplicate IP. If the router assigns the same address to two devices, the disconnections are intermittent and baffling. Reserving a fixed IP rules it out.

Where cleaning up does help

If the television is short on memory, the system kills processes to survive, and sometimes the network process is the one that goes. Freeing memory reduces disconnections as a side effect. Not the cause, but a factor.

The solution that always works

An ethernet cable. If the television has an RJ45 port and you can reach it with a cable, the problem is over. It is not elegant and it is the most effective answer on this list.

If you cannot cable it, a USB-ethernet adapter works on many Android TVs and costs little.